Hours Earlier

  The Three Eyed One had waged a successful hunt.

  After letting loose its Two Eyed hounds, it mostly just wandered around. It had been tasked with a simple job, one that involved crushing whatever the hounds couldn’t kill. Beyond that, it was free to do what it pleased. It mostly just ambled around, sampling the local wildlife and partaking of the local flora. The fruits on the ends of some strange vines were particularly tasty. At one point, it did run into a particularly unfortunate group of prey, which it destroyed quickly and without much difficulty. Their blaster rifles couldn’t scratch the surface of its reinforced hide, and physically they were far beneath it. As it munched on its prey’s remains, it did a quick Psionic inventory of the status of its subordinates.

  Of the 12, one of them had already been killed. Perhaps bad luck or a particularly strong enemy squad. But ten of the remainder were broadcasting triumph, indicating that they had either found or destroyed their designated prey. The Three Eyed one had just finished its meal and stood back up, however, when something strange happened. One of those broadcasting triumph switched its broadcast almost immediately to one of terror. When the Three Eyed One focused on this hound’s location, it felt the distant resonance of an extraordinary power, one that rejected its own in every single way.

  The Three Eyed One watched as this power flared up, and the fear and pain of its subject increased, before the hound was finally extinguished. The power faded away at the exact same time, but the Three Eyed One was not fooled. Something had interfered with its hunt, some power antithetical to their race, and that something remained on this planet. It was a threat to their entire mission, and thus it needed to be extinguished.

  The Three Eyed One took off, loping south, knocking aside trees and anything else in its way. It didn’t bother trying to conceal its movements. Whatever was out there would know it was coming, but it didn’t care. It had never relied on stealth like lesser beings, preferring instead to crush its enemy with overwhelming force. This enemy was far to the south, so it would take some time for the Three Eyed One to find it.

  But it would find it. And it would do its job.

  …

  While Daniel had been passed out, the rest of the group had collectively decided to bury Gulliman’s body. They’d bring it back to the pods when it was time to leave, but everyone knew the implications of doing it this way. It implied the serious possibility of more casualties. The Pioneers didn’t want to waste their time with multiple trips back and forth to the pods, after all. Daniel silently agreed with this decision when they told him about it. After telling him about that decision, the group had interrogated the man about his recently acquired high-tech armor. Daniel gave them the full story about finding the door and all the strange text, but nobody had ever heard of something like this happening before. They were all in the same confused boat, so everyone decided to figure it out later and get to planning their next move.

  The consensus of the group was that they needed to finish Command’s mission for them before they did anything else. Daniel told them about his desire to investigate the door, a desire most of them shared, but they all agreed to lock in the credit for their Quota first. The problem was that they were now extremely vulnerable to any attacks while walking around in the open air. Another Diaboco raid would probably finish them, since Daniel couldn’t really fill Gulliman’s shoes, even with his recent upgrades. That said, his upgrades were quite excellent.

  Predatory Grace enhanced his Dexterity outright and imbued him with a natural, intuitive understanding of how to move swiftly and silently. It scaled with Dexterity and Adaptability, meaning that the higher those stats got, the more powerful the bonus would be. It created a kind of feedback loop, where the more his Dexterity grew, the more efficient the stat would become. Most Personal Attributes tended to scale with Adaptability, but growth in that stat would improve the stat to a lesser degree since the scaling for Adaptability was (F) rather than the (E) rating Dexterity had.

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  Daniel took the time to try to get used to these new benefits. The others had given him one of their backup spears, dropped by one of the men previously killed, and he spun it around with an ease and grace that seemed otherworldly to the others. He switched to his gun, and marveled at how quickly he could switch targets, dry-firing the weapon at every rock and tree in sight at a rapid clip. Eventually, half to show off and half to test what he could really do, he started doing leaping cartwheels at high speeds. He would perform the maneuver with his bare hands, summon his revolver midair, acquire and “shoot” a target, dismiss the weapon, then land on his hands and throw himself back into the air again. He was dry firing because he didn’t want to draw predators or waste ammo, of course.

  Daniel wasn’t exactly used to these kinds of acrobatics, however, and he ended up failing more than once. Stats and Attributes represented what you had the potential to do. Skill, experience, and training were still required. Like when he was dealing with the buffs his armor had brought, Daniel would need to work at getting used to his bonuses and making his new abilities his own. This was especially true with his Psionic Capacity.

  The first time Daniel used the Hunter’s Domain, he nearly fried his brain.

  Immediately, his Mental Energy began draining at a rapid clip, pouring away like a water through an opened dam. But more disturbing than that was the noise. The buzzing and chirping of the insect and bird population was a cacophonous droning in his ears, suddenly enhanced and clear to hear. The river behind him gushed out a solid wall of sound, the nearby mosquitos zooming around angrily. Most poignant of all were the sounds of the men nearby. The pounding of their hearts thundered in his ears, their breath like the whistling of mighty storm winds. The myriad sounds, large and small, steadily blended together in one massive roar, sensory overload that still wasn’t as overwhelming as his sight. He had eyes in every direction, able to see even small details on the bark of faraway trees or the worms crawling in the mud beneath his feet. It wasn’t like normal sight, where you just focused on one a select few things and allowed a lot to fade into the background. No, it was like his senses had been spread out over everything, like jam on a piece of toast, and he was forced to see all the minute details simultaneously.

  Naturally, Daniel couldn’t take much more than a second of this before he began to scream. Cutting off the flow of energy stemmed the tide of info, but he was left with a splitting headache that forced him to collapse in pain.

  As the headache subsided, he staggered to his feet and shook off his remaining disorientation. Overwhelming or otherwise, he needed to master his abilities. Daniel rubbed his hands together, narrowed his eyes, and tried to activate the Domain with only a small amount of energy this time. Mercifully, the information he garnered with a lesser activation of the Domain was much less intense, the experience more like being surrounded by windows and being able to see through all of them at once. That was still disorienting, as one might imagine, but Daniel immediately started working on getting used to his enhanced senses.

  It was grueling, mentally taxing work, but Daniel quickly learned how to focus and adapt, making the expanded sight more digestible and treating it like a broadened periphery. Like this he could fight easily and avoid any sneak attacks. His Capacity enhanced vision also allowed him to see deeper, meaning he could read people’s movements much more easily as well. The stat boosts it gave him weren’t bad either, the further enhanced Dexterity ensuring that he could more easily react to anything he saw. Daniel was starting to worry that he’d specialized too much in that one stat. If possible, he’d like to balance things out a bit more in the future. But for now, he was overjoyed at his recent improvements.

  Once Daniel was ready to move, the entire group went upriver, per their original plan. They gathered resources meticulously, but the Briconium started to be thinner on the ground once they got more than 20 klicks north. It was a little disappointing, but Daniel just had to hope that Command would be okay with that. There should still be a lot trapped under the surface, after all. On the upside, Daniel’s new ability had shown him the locations of two Hila berry vines, allowing him to pocket another thousand credits of the valuable red berries.

  Once they’d gone their 40 klicks, they immediately trundled back to the place where they’d originally hunted the Sparkhooves. Daniel wanted to hunt more, but they were now certain they’d seen the last of the Silverfish migrations by now. No migrations meant no buffalo to feed on said migrations. Shelving his disappointment, Daniel pulled up the original coordinates of the cave he’d found and led them through the jungle to that fateful place.

  The hole in the ground was a menacing looking trap, a cavernous maw on the jungle floor that threatened to swallow up anything that walked over it unawares. The men were lowered into the aperture via rope one-by-one. Once everyone besides Daniel had been lowered down, the young man jumped down casually, landing easily on his feet. He strode through the cavern, everyone else falling into rank behind him, but his projected confidence was largely a fa?ade. What if the door remained unresponsive again?

  Daniel was relieved to see his worries were for nothing. The center of the door pulsed with white-gold light as the Pioneers drew closer, the rhythmic light reminiscent of some kind of standby indicator. The men gasped a little at the eerie-yet-beautiful sight, and everyone held their breath when the light suddenly stopped. Daniel stopped walking when it did, suddenly worried he’d done something wrong, then more golden text flashed across his HUD: “User Recognized”

  With a great rumble, the door began to open.